Anti-government rancher Cliven Bundy explained to members of the Independent American Party (IAP) over the weekend how God had guided him into a showdown with armed federal agents in Nevada earlier this year.

Bundy, who quit the Republican Party to join the IAP, told members at a summit in St. George that militias and other people had come to support him during his standoff with Bureau of Land Management agents because they had been “spiritually touched” by God, according to The Spectrum.

“Let me tell you about the standoff,” he recalled. “That’s where, we the people, faced the guns of the United States bureaucracy… You know on the morning of that standoff, I only sort of received a couple of things from our Heavenly Father.”

Bundy said that God had told him that he was supposed to ask a local sheriff to disarm the federal agents.

“I shook hands with — I don’t know — two, three, four thousand people. I hugged their women,” he remarked. “And let me tell you, I felt sort of the feeling that I know that our Lord and Savior feels toward each of you.”

“That wasn’t all the Lord told me,” Bundy continued. “He said, if they don’t take away these arms [from the federal agents], you — we the people — will have to face these arms in a civil war. He said, this is your chance to straighten this thing up.”

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David Edwards has served as an editor at Raw Story since 2006. His work can also be found at Crooks & Liars, and he's also been published at The BRAD BLOG. He came to Raw Story after working as a network manager for the state of North Carolina and as as engineer developing enterprise resource planning software. Follow him on Twitter at @DavidEdwards.